SuperH-basd MCUs now fit car and home audio products

San Jose, Calif.  Renesas Technology America, Inc.’s newest SuperH based 32-bit microcontroller chips are targeted at car and home audio products that have audio data playback functions compatible with various compression standards, especially those that record music data in compressed form on a disk drive.

The SH7261 SuperH SuperH RISC devices have been designed with sufficient processing power and functionality to replace the system controller,
the DSP and LSI logic chips traditionally required for digital audio processing. Also the four SH7261 series devices have the new superscalar SH2A-FPU CPU core with a built-in floating point unit (FPU), which performs fast arithmetic operations to offer excellent real-time control capabilities. The superscalar architecture has a performance advantage because it executes two instructions per clock cycle, bringing higher performance for a given operating frequency. For example, at 80MHz, the device achieves 192
million instructions per second (MIPS), 160 mega floating point operations per second (MFLOPS) and at 120MHz, it achieves 288 MIPS, 240 MFLOPS.

The MCUs accommodate middleware for various audio formats such as MP3, WMA and AAC (Advanced Audio Coding). Among the other features of the chip is that coder-decoders can be implemented by software. The devices’ instruction set is upward-compatible with the earlier SH-2 CPU cores, yet achieves better ROM code efficiency, helping to reduce program size by approximately 25 percent and thereby save memory cost.

Two SH72611 models provide a 2-channel CAN controller, while two SH72612 models provide an IEBus controller. All offer many other
built-in functions, too, such as a multifunction timer unit (MTU2-type), 10-bit A/D converter, 8-bit D/A converter, and serial communication interface with 16-stage first-in-first-out (FIFO). In combination with the control/audio processing capabilities of the CPU, these on-chip peripheral functions allow audio products to be built with fewer component parts at significantly less cost.

For details of the new controller, check out the following block diagram.

Sample pricing for the SH72611 is $16.20 and $15.30 for the 80 Mhz and 120 Mhz versions respectively. These units have an on-chip CAN controller. The SH72612 with on-chip IE bus controller is priced at $15.70 and $14.80 for the 80Mhz and 120 Mhz version respectively. The units are housed in 176-pin LQFP (24mm by 24 mm packages).

To aid system design, the SH7261 devices have on-chip debugging functions, so real-time debugging can be carried out at the maximum
operating frequency. The USB bus-powered E10A-USB debugging tool, which doesn’t require an external power supply, is available for debugging
tasks that require emulation, and the High-performance Embedded Workshop implements a comprehensive integrated software development
environment.

Driven by market needs, Renesas Technology says new microcontroller chips are being developed with higher speed, performance, and functionality. For example, the company is readying a high-speed SH7261 version with a 200 MHz operating frequency, improving performance through the use of multiple CPU cores, and implementing further peripheral function enhancements including provision of CD servo control functions and a USB interface.